Across the Wounded Centuries -- How an Enlightenment-Era Poet 'beat' Burroughs to the Punch by Nearly 200 Years....

Caleb Whitefoord, 1773 or 74.  Sir Joshua Reynolds

Over the years, I've come across several essays about how some of the earliest novels anticipate literary postmodernism's ideas and concerns.  To whit, Cervantes' conceit in Don Quixote (1605 & 1615) that the story is translated from an obscure manuscript....the totally black page, the Alfred Bester-like typographical oddities, the symbol representing how a character waves his cane in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759 to 1767). To my regret, two novels I have not yet read.  And to my surprise, the latter book was inspired by....the former!

Today, I came across another example. One Caleb Whitefoord (1734-1810) - wine merchant, diplomat, and poet - discovered a novel way of reading the newspapers, that is to say, across the columns instead of down them.  In addition to finding the results amusing, Whitefoord, among others, pointed out that this method often revealed the unspoken agendas and contradictions of the newspapers.  It also pointed to a concern we don't often associate with the 18th century, but to our own:  media overload.  The populace was becoming more literate, and a welter of daily papers and monthly magazines, journals and reviews were there to supply the ever-growing demand.

Quote:

It was Whitefoord’s genius to notice that when you took a broadsheet newspaper of tightly set columns, and started reading across the paper’s columns - rather than reading down to the column’s next line - you could achieve what he described as “coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.” Whitefoord called this cross-reading, and he was so amused by it that he would publish sheets of his favorite specimens and hand them out to friends in Fleet Street coffeehouses. (from an interview with Paul Collins)

Coffeehouses, eh? Poets, coffee....and folk singers? Enlightenment Beats?

Some examples:

Dr. Salamander will, by her Majesty’s command, 

undertake a voyage round -

The head-dress of the present month.

Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,

and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.

Notice is hereby given -

And no notice taken.

A perceptive essay by Giles Goodland about Whitefoord's texts can be found here.  All quotes and information about Whitefoord from this point on come from Goodland's essay, which I urge you to read.

Whitefoord first published what he called "cross-readings" in The Public Advertiser in an article entitled A New Method of Reading Newspapers (1766).  

He used this method again in the New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1770); more cross-readings also occur in various broadsides and ephemeral publications, now hard to trace, usually under his bye-line of 'Papyrius Cursor'.

Writing under this name in 1775 (Fugitive Misc. II. 49-51) he describes his work in a way that seems so modern in its insistence that the consumer of the media is powerless against a flood of contradictory messages from all spheres of an increasingly complicated and contradictory society, it is worth quoting from at length: (Goodland)

18th-Century prose is best read in its entirety, so instead of providing a snippet, please read the quote yourself.  Goodland provides a few more examples:

The comet is now on it's return to the sun—

pursuant to a decree of the high court of chancery.

At the meeting at Newcastle, Sir B. F. D. was in the chair—

and appeared like a dull, faint nebulous star.

Yesterday there were violent disputes in the common-council—

For some time past the volcano has been extremely turbulent.

Now in rehearsal the distrest mother, a tragedy—

Occasioned by the undutiful behavior of the Colonies.

Lucius Papirius Cursor, btw, was a much-vaunted Roman politician and general who Livy compared to Alexander the Great.  As many of Whitefoord's texts were political in nature, perhaps he's mocking the puniness of contemporary politicians by comparison?  Or perhaps it's ironic self-aggrandizement?  Contemporaries would have known the reference, but why he chose this nom de plume, I'm not sure.... 

Apparently, Whitefoord's cross-readings were quite popular and luminaries such as Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, and Dr. Johnson found them both ingenious and hilarious.  An anonymous broadside from 1782 describes them in terms that, for me anyway, cannot but evoke the basic principles of Surrealism:

One particular species of entertainment resulting from [reading newspapers], is, after reading each column by itself DOWNWARDS, to read two columns together ONWARDS: whereby chance will bring about the most unaccountable connections, and frequently couple persons and things the most heterogeneous; things so opposite in their nature and qualities, that no man would ever have thought of joining them together.

I added the boldface.  It's as if the author had anticipated Lautréamont by 100 years, he who so inspired Surrealist aesthetics with the following line from Canto VI of Maldoror:

He is as handsome as....the chance juxtaposition of a 

sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

Goodland concludes:

It was striking to me that I could find no reference to Whitefoord or cross-readings in any studies of the roots of modernism. It seems to me that the work of Whitefoord is an important precursor of styles and poetries that would later be called avant-garde, at least in the fact that he stumbled by chance on Tristan Tzara's famous recipe for a Dada poem ('take a pair of scissors and a newspaper...'). The similarity is not only one of methodology. The humour in these juxtapositions depends on an understanding of class inequalities, the contradictions and aporia of party politics, and not least how easy it was – a mere matter of skipping over a thin white column – to expose the contradictions inherent in the mass media, and the interests they represent.

Burroughs, 1960: hey-day of the cut-up period

What strikes me is that Goodland mentions Tzara, but there is an even more direct example in the work of American author William S. Burroughs.  He did exactly the same thing with newspaper texts, and for pretty much the same reasons, as Whitefoord, almost precisely 200 years later.  Well, not exactly.  Whitefoord produces what read almost like headlines, or single epigrammatic phrases; Burroughs produced sustained texts.  Burroughs' texts are also generally more disjointed.  Perhaps Whitefoord was a bit more selective, or not as beholden to pure chance, meaning that he pruned the excerpts, adding or removing articles, conjunctions, whatever he required for a more coherent read.  Goodland suggests that some of the texts are not entirely found, but constructed.  Perhaps Whitefoord didn't feel as beholden to chance as Burroughs did; he wasn't, after all, striving to predict the future or break through control mechanisms, but produce witty and satirical observations about contemporary politics.

As he himself put it 

Whenever any change on [sic] Ministry happen'd, and the Party Writers on both sides began the work of serious abuse, I have always endeavour'd to make such changes a matter of Laughter rather than of serious concern to the people, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News, &c.

Burroughs experimented with cut-ups and fold-ins, and many variations of the "three column" format; some of the results can be found in The Burroughs File (1984).  This book, my first exposure to Burroughs, incidentally, is a collection of previously-published small books that were themselves often collections of short pieces he'd published in "little magazines," or mimeos, between 1962 and 1969.  A collection, then, of collections.

The book contains two examples from The White Subway (1973):  Who is the Third that Walks Beside You?  and a re-mix of sorts, Who is the | Walks Beside You | Written 3rd?

Another book included is The Old Movies, again providing two examples:  So Who Owns Death TV  and The Moving Times.  If I understand correctly, most of these pieces were originally collected into a German edition called Die Alten Filme (1979) and made available in English for the first time in The Burroughs File.

And all this is just the very tippy-top of the iceberg.  As Alex Wermer-Colan says in his introduction to the collection of Burroughs cut-ups he edited entitled The Travel Agency is on Fire:

[Burroughs] committed over a decade of his life to searching out every multimedia potential to produce works as collage....

He notes that the archive he drew upon 

...contains approximately 11,000 pages of unpublished material.  During my research, it became evident that a significant proportion of these texts went through the cut-up process.  These range from three-by-three textual grids to faux newspapers composed of headlines with three parallel columns of cut-up texts.  In addition archival collections at Arizona State University and Ohio State University suggest that even more cut-up material exists.

Most of these pages date from 1959 to 1965, nearly 200 years after Whitefoord had discovered the cross-reading method.  As far as I know, Burroughs was never aware of his literary ancestor.  Any discussion of the cut-up method invariably brings up Tzara's Dadaist forays into aleatory texts pulled from a hat, but nowhere have I ever seen Whitefoord's name in the plethora of essays about and biographical sketches of Burroughs or the method's actual "discoverer," Brion Gysin.  (Gysin was cutting mounts for some drawings and found that the newspapers he'd laid down had produced new texts that he, like Whitefoord, found hilarious.)  For Burroughs, cut-up literally became a weapon for destroying control mechanisms and predicting the future.  As Wermer-Colan points out, there are three collections of this material, one of which exceeds 11,000 pages.  Burroughs was not dabbling, but deadly serious.  There are thousands of pages of cut-ups, and probably thousands of his own "cross-readings" in those archives

Was Burroughs possessed?  Maybe he was, as Mailer points out, "by genius."  He himself felt he was possessed by an "Ugly Spirit" that led him to shoot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer.  I can't say if he was possessed, but he was certainly obsessed, and for all his brilliance and indeed, prophetic wisdom, he was prone to all sorts of crank ideas:  Reichian orgone boxes, Streiberesque alien abduction fantasies, and using cut-ups to predict, and change, the future.  In a way, he did predict and change the future.  But thousands of pages of cut-ups, years worth of activity....well, I admire the dedication and find it inspiring.  But man.  It's a little bit mad as well!

So, nothing new under the sun.  Burroughs knew about Tzara's aleatory use of found text, but he also advocated lifting whole sections of text; he suggests, for example, using descriptions of the jungle found in say, Joseph Conrad, and recycling them into one's own work.  Alas, even that idea had been used 100 years earlier by Lautréamont, who used descriptions of animals and their behavior from natural history encyclopedias in passages throughout Maldoror.  This does not undermine Burroughs' stature as a literary innovator.  He may have been familiar with Tzara, but was Lautréamont's intertextuality known in the US at that time?  And Burroughs certainly didn't know about Whitefoord.  Burroughs found ideas and twisted and tweaked them until he'd used every possible variation and squeezed out their last vital drops.  It's been said with some mirth that he is probably the only person who profited more from Scientology than they profited from him; indeed, his collaboration with filmmaker Antony Balch, The Cut Ups, even uses some of their proprietary auditing questions as a soundtrack!  

Burroughs' influence on contemporary culture is enormous, far-reaching and widespread.  Interesting, then, that 200 years before this gentleman junky rocked the world and took the novel to its limits with his cut-ups and fold-ins, a largely forgotten London merchant, a friend of Benjamin Franklin no less, invented the technique Burroughs would use for the better part of a decade for many of the same reasons as his literary forebear; to "deconstruct" the media and lay bare its hidden messages and agenda.  

One could argue that "cross-reading" was a technique to "fight back" against a news business that at times could be confusing and overwhelming, and where, absent direct experience, one had to trust what was communicated via the written word from a multitude of often contradictory sources.  After centuries of one authoritative text, the Bible, the written word was still an extraordinarily powerful medium, which in turn made the oft-dissonant chorus of newspapers disorienting.  This was why Burroughs sought to "rub out the word" and diminish the power of those who wielded it as a tool of control.  

England in 1766 was not yet a "Society of the Spectacle," but the era was the beginning of the modern nation state, of urbanization, the Industrial Revolution, and corporate Capitalism.  It was a time when nature was being organized into rigid taxonomies, defined as it were; when dictionaries and grammars were codifying and standardizing language into right...and wrong.  Right of course,  being the language of London's emerging upper middle classes.  Not aristocrats or landed gentry, but the merchant class, like Whitefoord himself.  While not unique to England, the link between one's language and one's social class is more openly, and perhaps more deeply felt in England than say, in France or the US, where égalité and "all men are created equal" are explicit state values.  By 1766, the written word had long been liberated from the Catholic Church, Gutenberg had taken care of that.  But the written word was  no less potent.  Broadsides, tracts, and pamphlets were very powerful indeed.  This was one reason for the Stamp Act of 1765; an attempt to limit the publication of incendiary tracts, to limit the growth of the professional classes, and to squeeze money out of the North American colonies.  The Act was repealed after less than a year due to violent protests, and is generally regarded as one of the leading causes of the American War of Independence. 

While on one hand the Stamp Act in part sought to quell the revolutionary potential of print media, the era was also the beginning of the newspaper business, in which the dissemination of information was inexorably linked with Capitalist interests.  Who knows exactly how the decline of print media will affect us down the line; but at the time Burroughs discovered cut-ups, the mainstream print media was still very authoritative and for him, a potent tool of control; as such, it was a target.  In 1766, Whitefoord might have been using cross-reading to satirize the newspaper business; in 1966, Burroughs wanted not only to destroy the newspaper business, but the written word itself....

Maybe in some ways the "cross-readings" were just a whimsical form of "fake news," a piss-take.  Ye Olde Onion, as it were.  But as with all satire, the humor contained a very real criticism of business as usual.  It's tempting to say Whitefoord was ahead of his time, but I think he came at exactly the right time.  Like the novels of Cervantes and Sterne, his readings say:  "don't trust everything you read."  Just when the news business began to flourish, he was there to signal caution, to say "read between the lines," to be skeptical.  The postmodernists rediscovered what their literary ancestors had already surmised.  Maybe Whitefoord was being whimsical, but he certainly had more of a purpose than humor alone.  Which is not to denigrate humor - au contraire - it reminds us not to underestimate the value of humor as a rhetorical tool.  Humor is another quality Burroughs shared with Whitefoord.  

Now, if someone smarter than I would connect all of this with the Lettrists, the Situationists, and the concept of détournement, we might just have a Ph.D. thesis in the making....come to think of it, they knew the value of a good joke as well....